Taking Root

Introduction

We are continuing our series this morning on the book of Ephesians, and Paul’s letter here is all about the formation of followers of Jesus to live life as an extension of Jesus, so that a world that is held down by spiritual forces might be set free as Jesus, through you, comes near.

That’s a weighted sentence. Let me break it down a bit for you.

In our FOLLOW mentoring, we talk briefly about this three step process of a healthy disciple.

Be with Jesus: enjoy his presence, come to know him, love him, be healed by him, be comforted and satisfied by him.

Become like Jesus: As you spend time with Jesus, you are strengthened by his power, you embody his love, you think of yourself less and others more, and you are prepared to lay down your own life so that others can live.

Do what Jesus did: When Jesus’ priorities become yours, when you are filled with his power and strength, when his love for others becomes your love for others, the only natural step is to walk that out. To live more generously, to speak more boldly, to lift people up and to suffer well. To offer forgiveness and grace, to seek out the lost and hurting and the broken and the discarded.

In a nutshell, this is about our spiritual formation, how Jesus comes and dwells with us and lavishes the stuff of heaven on us and in us now, and as we are changed into his likeness, we then go and love us well. That what the UNION of heaven and earth is all about.

PRAY

We are right at the cusp of the second half of Paul letter, getting into “the good stuff,” the practical stuff, about how we go about living a life patterned after Jesus. But before we do, Paul has one last encouragement. It’s a prayer for Christians before we head out on mission. And without this truth set in your heart, your mission will be rough. So listen carefully.

Paul Prays… Again (Eph. 3:14-15)

Ephesians 3:14–15 (CSB)

For this reason I kneel before the Father from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named.

Think of Paul’s prayer here like packing up for a long journey.

A couple summers ago, I went on a backpacking trip with my older daughter and a couple family friends. We had a great time, but let me tell you what, it’s not because we’re so experienced at it. We’re not campers. It’s not that we don’t like the idea of it, but I think given the chance to visit nature or sleep in it, we choose visiting. Now, our friends are pros. They’ve got all the gear, and it’s down to a science. And they have to, because backpacking means you take your campsite, your food, your clothing, on your back wherever you go. For miles upon miles, if that’s what it takes. And if you don’t prepare right, you won’t make it. So the night before we headed out, we went over to their house and we laid out everything we had. And piece by piece, we took was was most important and necessary, and left behind anything that wasn’t. How you prepare for the journey will determine your success or failure.

So what’s the journey here? What are you preparing for? It’s to follow in Jesus’ footsteps. To walk the same path he walked. Paul is about to describe a life that is so wholly others centered that you will not have time to dwell on you. Paul going to use language like “be imitators of God,” “Be kind and compassionate,” “be wise, make the most of time,” submit to one another in the fear of Christ.” Paul is going to call each and every one of you to a life of humble servitude and counter-cultural relationships, so that the world may see God revealed through you. That’s a mountain of a journey. And YOU are called to it! He’s not just asking the pastors and the missionaries and the seminary students and the ultra-Christians to live this life. If you count yourself a follower of Jesus, guess what? This is where he’s leading you.

And that may feel daunting. I may have spoken this call, this mission over your life, and you may find yourself heavily burdened and woefully underprepared. And that is because we have been programed to believe that this journey of faith is something we have do on our own, in our strength, to earn God’s love and prove our devotion to him. This is why Paul prays. Because you the journey ahead is not only difficult for the everyday human. It is impossible for any human. It can only be possible if God is intimately and powerfully involved in the preparation process to turn you into a journeyer.

Strengthened with Power (Eph. 3:16-17)

So how we start? What do we need in our packs for this journey? Believe it or not, Paul says we really only two things. First, Paul says we need power.

Ephesians 3:16–17 (CSB)

I pray that he may grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with power in your inner being through his Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.

Now, as humans, I think we are actually used to praying for power. But this is not the sort of power we typically pray for. Typically the prayer for power comes up when we need help to accomplish something on our own. We breathe a quick prayer to remember information for a test. We pray for amplified skill to impress a boss. We pray for energy to get through a long, full day of events. And that’s because power, by our definition, is the ability to impose our will on something, to effect change through our action. So naturally, if you want something to change in your life for your better, you need power for that. And you don’t have enough skill or intelligence or energy, hey, you’ve got God on our side, right?

Can I ask you a serious question though? What if these sort of prayers—prayers for power in our outer being—is thinking too small for our God? Do we expect too little of God? What if our God is not as interested in easing our circumstances as he is transforming our very natures? Which is the greater miracle? Which is the greater revelation of who God truly is?

Paul doesn’t pray that the Ephesians would be strengthened with power in their outer being, but their inner being. And this is powerful, our English translation doesn’t hit quite as well. What Paul is asking is that God would strengthen your character, your nature, the core of who you truly are. Inner power means that the world can break your body, but it can’t break your spirit. You can be weak in your circumstances, but strong in your hope. It means that your life may not get any easier at all when you choose to follow Jesus, but yet you will somehow still be satisfied and content.

There’s a lie out there that you might choose to believe. That if you want to be a “good Christian” you have to have everything together. You have to be smart and well-versed in theology. You have to have a great marriage and a good job. You have to have perfect kids who never do anything wrong. And you can never lie, or struggle, or be late to church. But all of that is our outer power. It has nothing to do with how Jesus is shaping you from the inside out.

Jonathan Edwards was a preacher from the 1700s, and his heart was “revival,” a desire to see a world awakened to the reality of God in the world and to see dead hearts made alive. And he says this about it:

The true signs of revival in an individual, city, or church are when people are changed at the heart level.

And that is Paul’s prayer, right? In fact, is THE prayer. This is the vision of every church at all times. It’s the vision of Christ for His Church that you—and every other believer—would be strengthened, empowered, and filled with the fullness of Christ. The M.O. of God is to change hearts and making us more like him. Replacing selfishness with patience. Ego with love. Anxiety with peace. Lust with freedom. Loneliness with God’s presence. Let’s not lower our expectations for what God might do, but raise them. Instead of asking God for mere out power that truly changes nothing, let’s prayer for a deeper, greater power that changes the very core of who we are. We pray that Christ might embed himself in our desires, in our worldview, in our identities, that we might no longer live as Jacob’s or Lucy’s or Zach’s or Diane’s, but that we might live as the embodied Christ for the world.

Rooted in Love (Eph. 3:17-19)

That’s power. And if you think that was big, wait 'til you hear about love.

Ephesians 3:17–19 (CSB)

I pray that you, being rooted and firmly established in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the length and width, height and depth of God’s love, and to know Christ’s love that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

For the journey of following Jesus that lies ahead, you need a power that changes who you are on the inside. Second, you need a love that grounds you and steadies you, that becomes the foundation for everything you do, a love so vast and all-encompassing that it is beyond our understanding, and yet somehow we get to take hold of it.

Paul prays that love would be at the core of everything you know and say and do. It’s the “why” of the Christian life. How you follow Jesus? God’s power dwelling with in you. Why you follow Jesus? Because you are so abundantly loved.

Now look, Paul doesn’t pray that your power would increase, but that God’s power would increase in you, that you would become a vessel for God’s power, effecting God’s will and purpose. Paul also does pray that you would love people better, that you would grasp why people should be loved or could be loved or why you could be loved. Paul prays that you might be enveloped by whose love? God’s love. And Christ’s love. The prayer is that you would be emptied of your own power and love, and that would become a vessel filled with a greater power and love that is beyond your wildest understanding. And knowing this love intimately and deeply becomes absolutely vital for the journey ahead.

How do you love people well? Seriously, how do you love people the way I read us being called to love as God’s church? Because I have a grasp of relational love. I love my wife because we bonded over our common interests and background, and I thought she was really pretty, and over time that deepened and grew less selfish and more honestly sacrificial. I get that kind of love. I love my kids because they are little images of me, I see myself in them, I created them, and I love them as they are a part of me. I get that kind of love.

But loving the neighborhood gossip on my street? Loving the punk kids around the corner? Loving the complete stranger who cut me off in traffic? Loving the people who have wronged me and slandered me and accused me? Loving enemies of the church or of nations? What does it mean to love those people? Is there some sort of love that enables me to say that I love them without actually having to love them? Can I love them and hate them at the same time, or at least be indifferent to them?

You see how this gets really challenging when we try to love by our own standards and capacities to love, right?

I think this is why Paul’s prayer here is so important. Because our prayers tend to look a lot less like Paul’s and more like this: God, please ease the road ahead of me; clear the persecution and smooth out the circumstances, so that I can get through this journey by my own strength. God, please take away people’s addictions and vices, transform their desires and make them more like me and what I believe, so that they will be easier to love the way I know how. Amen.

And yet, this way of Jesus is to bring real spiritual life and healing to people, and to love them so sincerely, so deeply, that you would lay down your very life for them, even your enemies, even those who persecute you and slander you and hate you. And I think it becomes clear at this point that the only way to realistically love the people you are going to encounter with the sort of self-giving, others-centered love is for that love to be something beyond you. It has to be the love of God.

God loves you and he loves this world so deeply because he is the Father. Paul kneels before God and calls him “the Father from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named.” It’s wordplay in the Greek; he says, “the pater from whom every patria in heaven and on earth is named.” It’s clever, and what he’s getting at here is that every created being in all of existence, physical and spiritual, traces it’s lineage back to a single Creator, a single author and originator. Every speck of creation bears the mark of the Father, and so God loves with the same love that I bear for own kids. It’s the only love I have ever known that began unconditionally, and that is what God has for everything. It’s that love that Jesus expresses when he gives himself up to twisted people, who spit on him and beat him and mock him, who press thorns into his scalp and nails into his wrists and ankles, who deny him and hate him and curse his name. Jesus bears all of that because his love can take it, because the only way to conquer sin and death was to take it all with him to the grave and leave it behind.

So how in the world do we grasp a love like God’s that Paul says is ungraspable, or know a love like Jesus that Paul says is unknowable? The answer is that it’s not our love. You cannot love like God. Only God can love like God. And so we pray that God’s love would fill us and take over our minds, our hearts, our wills.

To be Jesus to the World (Eph. 3:20-21)

And the goal? It’s so we can be Jesus to the world.

Ephesians 3:20–21 (CSB)

Now to him who is able to do above and beyond all that we ask or think according to the power that works in us—to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.

Paul gives a reason for why he hopes to see, not just you, but all the saints filled with the the transformative power of God in your inner being and with the ungraspable, unknowable love of God. He says “so that you might be filled with all the fullness of God.” This is one of those super-heady concepts that I feel we almost overlook when it comes to faith or Christianity or the church, and if we fail to get it, we miss everything. The fullness of God is everything that defines God. His nature, his character, his motives, his rule and reign, his mission. Everything about God that makes him who he is, that is the fullness of God. And John’s gospel is probably clearest on this. Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is the fullness of every God is and is all about. And his mission in coming to earth was to reveal the character and nature of God so that humans might come to know him. Jesus expressed the fullness of divine love in human terms, by embracing strangers, eating with sinners, touching lepers and unclean people. Lifting up the poor and destitute and discouraged. Taking on the punishment that all humanity deserves for its crimes. Jesus brought divine love and power into the every day by being the walking taking embodiment of God. And he does this—Jesus says this himself in John 17—so that he might reveal God’s glory. Glory is the weight and fullness of who someone is, it’s laying bare the sum of who you are in stark, visible reality.

Now, here it is, one last time from Paul’s mouth. The mission of the church, all that we go and do and be and live, everyday, is to reveal to the world that same glory. It’s to show everyone who God is, that he is gracious and compassionate and loving and faithful and forgiving. And we do that by being filled with the same divine power and love that filled Jesus Christ when he walked this earth. We live life as an extension of Jesus.

Church, this is it. You want a better marriage? Pray that you would be filled with the power and love of God. You want a more satisfying career? Pray that you would be filled with the power and love of God. You want to raise your children right or be more generous with your time and money or just be happier and less stressed out with the craziness of life? Pray that you would be filled with the power and love of God. Because the whole point of this is that Jesus welcomes you in, Jesus changes you, and then Jesus sends you to be Jesus to others. And yet, this should not burden you, but free you. Our job is not to be strong enough or good enough or loving enough. Our job is to need him, more and more, every day. Just need him.

PRAY